BAINBRIDGE ISLAND – Potential eases to Winslow’s noon-hour parking crunch during the summer months might come in the form of tweaks to city programs, new incentives or new city-owned parking, according to a city parking consultant.

In its downtown parking study, the city's third such analysis since 2002, city consultant Framework collected data on two days this summer. It found few open spots near Winslow Way from noon to 1 p.m., as that area went over 85 percent of capacity. Parking spaces, both on and off-street, further out from Winslow Way remained open on those days at that peak hour.

Systemwide, both on-street and off-street parking hit around 75 percent of available spaces during the noon hour on a weekday, according to the consultant. On a weekend collection, on-street peak occupancy hit 74 percent at the peak, while off-street occupancy reached 57 percent.

During a presentation to City Council on Tuesday night, Framework consultant Jeff Arango noted that if the city wanted to look at freeing up parking downtown, it could do so through a few tweaks.

Solutions might include simplifying the current on-street parking system and revisions to the city’s downtown employee parking program, including increases in permit prices, public transit incentives and other ways to encourage downtown business employees to park further out. City partnerships with private businesses to open up use of their parking spaces in the downtown core could also allow for additional space.

Investments in more nonmotorized and transit access, converting some streets to one-way access to make room for more on-street parking and building more city-owned parking could open up more space as well, Arango said.

One solution that’s been floated by city officials recently, a downtown parking structure, could be a benefit the city could offer, Arango said, but noted that a paid parking garage wouldn’t pay for itself and would likely need to be subsidized by the city.

“My overall impression is that your downtown seems to be thriving,” he said to members of City Council. “I wouldn’t say there’s a catastrophic problem. But if the city thought it was a benefit to provide additional parking to support the downtown businesses and thought it was worth it to pay for that and didn’t have any misconceptions around the ability to have some cost recovery around that, then that’s a decision you guys could make.”

“One of the reasons our downtown seems to nice now is it has a good balance,” Councilman Ron Peltier said. “There are a lot of cars, but there aren’t too many. They drive slow because of the way the street is designed. I just really worry about introducing a lot more vehicles downtown and pandering to single-occupancy vehicles and destroying that natural feel we have downtown.”

Framework is expected to submit a finalized report with strategies for the city in the first quarter of 2018.